C.K. Stead

(Peter Reading, 1946-2011)

‘The only permanence I suppose is in having been’ –                     thus           in four words             conjugating present and...

Brasch in his velvet voice and signature purple tie

complained to his journal that you had ‘interrupted’.

I wasn’t sorry. That was Somervell’s coffee shop

nineteen-fifty-three. Eighteen months later you and I

were skidding on the tide-out inner- harbour shelvings

below your house from whose ‘small room with large windows’ you saw

that geranium ‘wild...

The release in 2009 of the first two volumes of T.S. Eliot’s letters, and the year before of the final volume of Katherine Mansfield’s, raises questions about the relationship between these two and their spouses, Vivien Haigh-Wood and John Middleton Murry.* Why was Eliot distrustful, and even apprehensive, of Mansfield? What was Murry’s relationship with Vivien – and...

1. I lift the lid on our compost bin. At the corner

of sight, Fantail flickers like migraine through the sudden

insect cloud. I am supplier – flies the supplies.

2. Feather-weight, Fantail bounces back off invisible

ropes. He has perfected the hook and the jab. Dancer

he is deft snatcher in flight of invisible snacks.

3. Scriptwriter also of dark memorials, it’s said

he conceals...

The New Zealand novelist Maurice Shadbolt recently published what he described as a ‘memoir’, explaining that this form differed from autobiography in that it claimed only to recount events as the author remembered them, making no promise of accuracy. Since Shadbolt had announced publicly, a year or so before, that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the excuse for inaccuracy and invention was complete. An expectation was aroused which the book didn’t disappoint.